The Washington Football Team, previously known as the Washington Redskins, is changing its name to the Washington Commanders. This earth shaking event follows years of agonizing over what to rename the team so as not to give offense to the delicate sensibilities of professional football fans.
In keeping with the spirit of finding appropriate names for things, I would like to propose renaming Washington, DC. Instead of being named after our first President, General George Washington, the capital could be renamed Absurdistan, USA since that moniker would better describe the daily activities that go on here.
Consider for instance, Georgetown Law School (oops, there’s that George thing again). Some students (I use the word loosely) of the Law school, armed with Twitter, have gone into full social justice warrior mode. They have taken to demanding that the Dean fire Ilya Shapiro, the newly appointed Executive Director and senior lecturer at the Law School’s Center for the Constitution. Shapiro had previously served as vice president and director of the CATO Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
Shapiro’s nominal offense was to fire off an admittedly inartfully composed Tweet to the effect that President Biden should not restrict his search for a new Supreme Court nominee only to black women. But Shapiro’s real offense is that he is a libertarian legal scholar who believes (gasp) that the Constitution means what it says.
Our progressive friends simply cannot permit that, and so have launched a cancellation effort in order to get Shapiro fired. But we should have pity on the poor little put upon revolutionaries of Georgetown Law. They have been traumatized. So in addition to the summary firing of Shapiro some have demanded a safe space where they can go and have a good cry; another demand is for a personal reparations package for black students to compensate them for missing class so they might go to the protest.
The Dean, who reportedly agreed to set aside space for the more lachrymose students, ought to consider handing out crayons, chocolate chip cookies and milk cartons to the social justice warriors who have had such a rough couple of days on the battlefront.
In the meantime in different section of Absurdistan, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer continues specializing in political malpractice. Knowing full well that he was going to lose, he called a vote on (1) Biden’s badly named Build Back Better Bill and another to (2) effectively end the filibuster. In so doing he forced Senate Democrats in competitive seats to take difficult votes while giving Republicans a freebie.
That vote could come back to haunt Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Among vulnerable Senate Democrats likely harmed by this bit of theatre are Rev. Ralph Warnock (GA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Michael Bennet (CO). But it might prevent a New York Democratic Senate primary challenge to Schumer by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Which is the likely reason why Schumer chose the path he did.
Meanwhile at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden, Grand Chief of Absurdistan reminded us that he is busy trying to lower inflation by spending lots more money that the Fed will obligingly print up. In addition he has taken other steps to get prices to fall. For instance oil prices fell to $78 a barrel in late November when the President announced his plan to release 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.
As of this writing the price of oil is $92 a barrel, about 18% higher than it was when Biden began working on lowering the price.
For sheer stupidity though, it’s hard to surpass Karen Attiah, the Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post. Here is a sample Tweet from her:
So white people, you guys need to figure this out how to erase the emotional rewards of sadistic pleasure white people have long enjoyed in dominating and destroying black bodies.
— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) June 17, 2020
But wait—there’s more. In today’s Washington Post, Attiah writes the following on the Whoopi Goldberg affair:
“ABC could have provided a space to educate Goldberg and the rest of its audience about the centuries-old history of global white supremacy, and to push back on current efforts to marginalize the voices of the oppressed.
Instead, it chose one of America’s favorite pastimes — silencing Black women.”
Not even worth commenting on.
JFB
